The Worst Media Interviews: 15 Bad Interview Examples and What Spokespeople Should Learn From Them

Search for bad interview clips and you will find a long reel of politicians, chief executives and the occasional professor losing an argument on air. What the clips rarely show is the bit that matters to anyone preparing a spokesperson: the hour before. Almost every famous media interview disaster was lost before the cameras rolled. The messages were vague, nobody rehearsed the hostile question, or the person in the chair misread what the interview was for. The on-air collapse is just where the gap became visible.

This piece takes 15 of the worst media interviews, mostly UK and mostly broadcast, and treats each as a case: what happened, the exact exchange that did the damage, the trap it reveals and the drill that prevents it. We have chosen fewer, better-explained bad interview examples over a long scroll, because a Communications Director briefing a chief executive next Tuesday needs a diagnosis, not a highlight reel. The examples below were reviewed against the broadcasters' own clips, transcripts and reports in October 2026, and we add to the list as new cases earn their place.

If you are weighing up whether your team needs help, it is worth knowing how media training fits with wider PR support. Many UK PR agencies offer media training alongside campaign work, and Prohibition PR is one of them: we are a Leeds-based integrated PR agency that runs media training alongside our PR campaigns, with filmed mock interviews that turn hostile and crisis scenarios built from a client's real risks. The practical difference to look for in any agency is whether the people who write your messages are the same people who rehearse you on them. When message development and rehearsal sit in different rooms, the spokesperson is usually the one who pays for it on air.

The five most common reasons media interviews go wrong

Media interviews most often go wrong in five repeatable ways. The non-answer is a refusal to answer a direct question, and the refusal becomes the story. The stuck soundbite is one line repeated regardless of the question, which reads as contempt rather than discipline. The missing number is a flagship claim with no figure behind it, or the wrong figure, so the interview collapses into arithmetic. Tone before facts is an accurate spokesperson who sounds self-pitying, flippant or cold, so the audience hears the register and not the content, while the uncontrolled set is a live microphone, an unlocked door or a hot camera capturing what was never meant for broadcast.

Underneath several of these sits a sixth, the misread brief: the wrong spokesperson, the wrong format, or an interview whose purpose nobody understood before it started. It appears in the pattern table below alongside the other five.

15 of the worst media interviews, and what each spokesperson got wrong

Each example follows the same four-part structure so the lessons line up: the interview, what went wrong, the trap, the fix. Where the broadcaster has published the clip or a transcript, we have linked it. Note that this list is about interview performance, not brand crises. For the latter, our round-up of consumer PR crisis examples covers that ground.

1. Michael Howard and Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight, 13 May 1997

The interview. Michael Howard, Home Secretary until the Conservatives' general election defeat earlier that month, sat down with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. The subject was the sacking of prisons director Derek Lewis, and whether Howard had threatened to overrule him.

What went wrong. Paxman asked "Did you threaten to overrule him?" and Howard answered a slightly different question. So Paxman asked again. And again. The BBC's own archive page records the question being put twelve times, and notes that the interview "was thought at the time to have contributed to the stalling of Mr Howard's political career". Howard never said yes or no.

The trap. The non-answer. In his 1997 Newsnight interview, Michael Howard treated a closed question as something to be managed around rather than answered, and the repetition, not the Derek Lewis affair, became the story.

The fix. Decide before the interview which closed questions you will answer directly, even uncomfortably, and which you genuinely cannot. For the first group, give the yes or no first and the context second. For the second, say plainly why you cannot answer, once, and bridge. Our guide to the seven types of question a journalist might ask covers how closed and leading questions differ, and why a plain answer sometimes disarms the interviewer entirely.

2. Ed Miliband's pooled strike interview, ITV News, 30 June 2011

The interview. On the day of a public sector pensions strike, Labour leader Ed Miliband gave a pooled interview to ITV News correspondent Damon Green, shared with the BBC and Sky.

What went wrong. Green asked six different questions. Miliband gave the same answer six times, almost word for word: the strikes were wrong while negotiations were ongoing, the government had acted in a "reckless and provocative manner", and both sides should "get around the negotiating table". The unedited tape found its way online. Green later wrote that he felt used as "a recording device for a scripted soundbite", as The Guardian reported.

The trap. The stuck soundbite. In his June 2011 ITV interview, Ed Miliband applied a technique designed for a 15-second edited clip to a full interview, and the audience saw the technique instead of the message. Spokespeople repeat the same line because they have been told to "stay on message", but a message that cannot flex to the question stops being a message and becomes a tell.

The fix. Three points, not one, each with its own proof and its own example, so the spokesperson can move between them as the questions change. In rehearsal, we count how many times a delegate returns to the identical sentence in playback. Twice is discipline. Four times is a clip.

3. Chloe Smith and Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight, 26 June 2012

The interview. That afternoon the Chancellor had deferred a planned fuel duty rise. Chloe Smith, the junior Treasury minister, was sent to Newsnight to defend the U-turn.

What went wrong. Paxman asked when she had been told about the decision; she could not give a straight answer. Then came "Do you ever wake up in the morning and think my god what am I going to be told today?" and, finally, "Do you ever think you're incompetent?" Conservative MPs blamed Downing Street the next morning for putting her up at all. Smith herself has since talked openly about the experience.

The trap. The misread brief, specifically the wrong spokesperson. In her 2012 Newsnight interview, Chloe Smith was asked to defend a decision she had not been part of, on a programme built for forensic questioning; the failure belonged as much to whoever made the booking as to the person in the chair.

The fix. A spokesperson rule, agreed in advance: nobody goes on air to defend a decision they were not in the room for unless they have been briefed on the decision's timeline, rationale and numbers. If that briefing cannot happen, the right answer to the bid is a statement, or a different spokesperson, or no.

4. Natalie Bennett and Nick Ferrari, LBC, 24 February 2015

The interview. On the morning the Green Party launched its general election campaign, leader Natalie Bennett went on LBC to talk housing. The policy was 500,000 new social-rent homes.

What went wrong. Ferrari asked how it would be paid for. Bennett said £2.7bn, which works out at £5,400 a home, and the arithmetic did not survive his next question. What followed was a long, painful silence that LBC still lists among its moments of the decade. Bennett later apologised to her party for what she called a "mind blank".

The trap. The missing number. In her 2015 LBC interview, Natalie Bennett took a flagship policy into a studio without the one figure a journalist was certain to ask for, and once the arithmetic failed there was nothing to bridge to.

The fix. Every message gets a number, and every number gets a stress test. Before any launch interview we work through the "how much, how many, by when, who pays" questions for each claim, and the spokesperson practises saying the figure out loud with its source. If a figure cannot survive division by the number of homes, people or units it covers, the message is not ready.

5. Diane Abbott and Nick Ferrari, LBC, 2 May 2017

The interview. Labour's shadow home secretary was on LBC to promote a pledge to recruit 10,000 extra police officers during the general election campaign.

What went wrong. Asked for the cost, Abbott said £300,000. That is £30 an officer. She corrected herself repeatedly before, in The Guardian's words, appearing to "find the right page in her briefing notes" and giving the year-by-year figures, ending at £298m by year five, as The Guardian reported. She later said she had "misspoken". The clip ran everywhere and the policy itself vanished from coverage.

The trap. The missing number, again, with a twist. In her 2017 LBC interview, Diane Abbott had the right figures in her notes but evidently not in her memory, so under pressure she reached for a number rather than the number.

The fix. Numbers are learned by saying them, not reading them. In a filmed mock interview we ask for the headline figure three or four times in different forms (total, per year, per unit, compared with the current spend) until it comes out the same way each time. One well-rehearsed figure beats a page of unrehearsed ones.

6. Theresa May and Julie Etchingham, ITV Tonight, 5 June 2017

The interview. A soft-format election special in which Etchingham asked the Prime Minister, among other things, the naughtiest thing she had ever done.

What went wrong. May offered that as a child she and a friend "used to run through the fields of wheat", as ITV's own report records, and the line travelled much further than anything she said that night about her record on security. She was not wrong. She was unprepared for a question the format made inevitable.

The trap. The misread brief, in this case the wrong audience. In her 2017 ITV Tonight interview, Theresa May prepared for a policy interrogation and got a personality interview, and the discomfort of her answer told viewers more than the answer did.

The fix. Prepare for the format, not just the subject. Breakfast television, podcasts, trade titles and "soft" profile pieces each have predictable questions that have nothing to do with your announcement. We list them in the briefing call and rehearse the human answers with as much care as the corporate ones.

7. Robert Kelly's family, BBC World News, 10 March 2017

The interview. Professor Robert Kelly, an expert on Korean politics, joined presenter James Menendez live from his home office in Busan to discuss the impeachment of South Korea's president.

What went wrong. His daughter Marion walked in behind him, followed by his toddler son, followed by his wife Jung-a Kim at full speed. Kelly kept talking. He had locked the study door for every previous live interview. "This time I forgot," he told The Guardian months later, adding that he and his wife had assumed "that was the end of my career as a talking head". It was not. A BBC producer asked permission to share the clip, and, as Kelly put it, "for two weeks we were the most famous family on earth".

The trap. The uncontrolled set. In his 2017 BBC World News interview, Robert Kelly got every word right and lost the interview to a door, which is why a remote interview is a production, not a phone call.

The fix. A remote set-up checklist, run every time: door locked, household briefed, phone on silent, wired connection where possible, camera at eye level, light in front not behind, a plain background, and a two-minute silence check before the line goes live. Kelly's case ended happily. Most do not.

8. Mike Coupe sings before an ITV News interview, 30 April 2018

The interview. Sainsbury's chief executive Mike Coupe was doing dozens of interviews on the day the proposed Sainsbury's and Asda merger was announced. Waiting for his ITV News slot, he sat in front of a camera that was already rolling.

What went wrong. He sang "We're in the money, the sky is sunny" from 42nd Street. On a day when suppliers were nervous and staff were asking about job losses, the clip wrote its own headline. Coupe apologised the same day for an "unguarded moment trying to compose myself before a TV interview", as the BBC reported.

The trap. The uncontrolled set, combined with tone before facts. In April 2018 Mike Coupe gave a perfectly competent set of interviews on the Asda deal, and the thing people remember is the moment he thought nobody was listening.

The fix. Treat the microphone as live from the moment it is clipped on until you are out of the building. We tell delegates to assume the camera is recording whenever a lens is pointed at them, and to use the waiting time to run the three messages silently, not to decompress. For a major announcement, an adviser sits with the spokesperson between interviews for exactly this reason.

9. Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis, BBC Newsnight, 16 November 2019

The interview. The Duke of York chose to speak, at length and on camera, about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, in an interview recorded at Buckingham Palace.

What went wrong. Almost everything that a planning session would have flagged. He said his judgement had been "coloured by my tendency to be too honourable". He explained that he could not have been sweating at a nightclub because of "a peculiar medical condition which is that I don't sweat". He placed himself at a Pizza Express in Woking on the night in question. Asked whether he regretted the friendship, he said "still not". The word "victims" appears once in the transcript, and it is Maitlis who says it. The BBC's full transcript is worth reading in full by anyone who prepares spokespeople. Four days later he stepped back from public duties.

The trap. Tone before facts, and underneath it a misread brief. In his 2019 Newsnight interview, Prince Andrew prepared as if the interview were a chance to set the record straight for himself, when the only audience that mattered was the public weighing his conduct against the victims', and every detailed alibi made him sound more concerned with his own reputation than with them.

The fix. Before any interview about harm, the first question in the planning session is "who was hurt and what do we say to them first?" If the spokesperson cannot open with a credible expression of empathy, the interview should not happen. This is also the clearest argument we know for filmed hostile rehearsal: an adviser watching the playback would have seen what viewers saw. Our crisis management training exists for precisely this kind of decision, including the decision not to do the interview at all.

10. Boris Johnson and the fridge, Good Morning Britain, 11 December 2019

The interview. The day before polling day in the general election, the Prime Minister was visiting a dairy in Pudsey, near Leeds, when Good Morning Britain's Jonathan Swain approached him live to ask for an interview with Piers Morgan.

What went wrong. Johnson said "I'll be with you in a second" and walked into a walk-in fridge. An aide was heard swearing. The Guardian's headline, "Boris Johnson 'hides in fridge' to avoid Piers Morgan interview", was typical of the day's coverage, and the Conservatives insisted he was not hiding. The clip was, inevitably, everywhere.

The trap. The non-answer, scaled up to a whole interview. In December 2019 Boris Johnson avoided a Good Morning Britain interview on camera, which turned a refusal that would have been a one-line story into a visual that ran all day. Refusing an interview is sometimes right; being seen to flee one never is.

The fix. Decide your interview policy before the visit, not during it. If you are declining a broadcaster, decline in writing, with a reason that will survive being read out on air, and make sure the people around you know so nobody improvises on camera. Is it ever right to walk out of, or refuse, a media interview? Yes: when the premise is false and the outlet will not correct it, when legal proceedings genuinely prevent comment, or when the format cannot give a fair hearing. But decline cleanly, in advance, and never mid-interview if it can be avoided, because the walk-out becomes the clip.

11. Tony Hayward, BP, 30 May 2010

The interview. Weeks into the Deepwater Horizon spill, BP's chief executive was in Venice, Louisiana, answering reporters' questions as oil reached the state's marshes.

What went wrong. "We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back." Eleven men had died on the rig. The BBC's compilation of Hayward's remarks includes the earlier Guardian interview in which he called the Gulf "a very big ocean" and a Sky News interview predicting the environmental impact would be "very, very modest". By the end of July, BP had announced he would step down.

The trap. Tone before facts. In May 2010 Tony Hayward's "I would like my life back" was, in strict terms, a sentence about wanting the crisis to end, but to a grieving coastline it sounded like self-pity, and no amount of engineering competence afterwards could undo that impression.

The fix. In a crisis, the spokesperson's first sentence is about the people affected, the second is about what is being done, and the third is about themselves only if a journalist insists. We rehearse this ordering until it is reflex, because under fatigue the reflex is what comes out, and it is the first exercise in our crisis management training. It also shapes the question of whether a chief executive should front a crisis at all, which we return to in the FAQ below.

12. Donald Trump and Jonathan Swan, Axios on HBO, aired 3 August 2020

The interview. Recorded at the White House on 28 July 2020 and broadcast in full by Axios, the interview covered the pandemic at the height of the summer 2020 wave.

What went wrong. Trump produced printed charts showing deaths as a proportion of cases, where the US compared well. Swan pointed out that deaths as a proportion of population was the relevant measure, where it did not. "You can't do that," Trump replied. Pressed on the daily death toll, he said: "It is what it is."

The trap. The missing number, dressed up as having one. In his 2020 Axios interview, Donald Trump had data but had chosen the metric that flattered him, and an interviewer who had done the arithmetic took it apart on camera.

The fix. Interrogate your own evidence before a journalist does. For every figure a spokesperson plans to use, we ask what the most unflattering alternative measure is and whether the spokesperson can explain why theirs is the fair one. If they cannot, the number stays in the briefing pack and out of the interview.

13. Liz Truss's BBC local radio round, 29 September 2022

The interview. Six days after the mini-budget, with the pound sliding, the Prime Minister broke her silence with eight interviews in an hour, patched by the BBC's Central News Service into breakfast shows in Leeds, Norfolk, Kent, Lancashire, Nottingham, Teesside, Bristol and Stoke. The full set is on BBC Sounds.

What went wrong. BBC Radio Leeds' Rima Ahmed opened with "Where've you been?" Radio Lancashire's Graham Liver asked why she could not rule out fracking in Lancashire when all its Conservative MPs opposed it; after a pause, Truss said "I don't accept the premise of your question". Radio Tees' Amy Oakden asked about dead crabs washing up on the North Sea coast. A Radio Kent listener asked if she was ashamed. As The Guardian's analysis noted, the hour produced more news than often emerges from a single Today programme slot, and the short, rapid interviews were "perfect for clipping and sharing on social media".

The trap. The misread brief, in the form of the wrong format. In her September 2022 local radio round, Liz Truss was prepared for one national argument about growth and met eight local ones about fracking, dead crabs and shame, each from a presenter with no reason to hold back.

The fix. Research the outlet, not just the subject. For a regional round, that means a one-page brief per station: the live local issues, the presenter's recent interviews, and the one question that will be asked whatever your announcement says. Then rehearse the pivot from the local question to the national message without ever saying "I don't accept the premise".

14. Gillian Keegan's hot mic, ITV News, 4 September 2023

The interview. With more than 100 schools in England fully or partly closed over crumbling RAAC concrete, the Education Secretary gave a round of interviews. The ITV one ended, but the microphone did not.

What went wrong. Still wired, Keegan asked whether anyone ever said "you've done a f***ing good job because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing". ITV ran it. She apologised within hours for an "off-the-cuff" remark, explaining that the reporter had been "making out it was all my fault".

The trap. The uncontrolled set, driven by tone before facts. In her September 2023 ITV interview, Gillian Keegan held her temper for the recorded answers and lost it for the unrecorded ones, which were, of course, recorded.

The fix. The same rule as the Coupe case, plus one more: build a release valve into the schedule. A spokesperson doing six hostile interviews in a morning needs five minutes alone, with no microphone, between them. If the venting has to happen, it happens there, with an adviser, not in the chair.

15. Elon Musk and James Clayton, BBC, 11 April 2023

The interview. Six months after buying Twitter, Musk agreed by email to a BBC interview, then insisted it be streamed live on Twitter Spaces. It ran for about 90 minutes instead of the planned 30. Clayton's first-person account is unusually candid.

What went wrong. Here the interviewee was the one who came out ahead. When Clayton suggested Twitter had become a more hateful place, Musk pushed him to name specific examples he had seen. Clayton could not. "Several times it felt like he was trying to interview me," he wrote afterwards. Musk also conceded, when asked, that he had bought Twitter because a court was about to make him.

The trap. The unsupported premise, this time on the journalist's side of the desk. In his April 2023 BBC interview, Elon Musk demonstrated that a spokesperson who knows the evidence better than the interviewer can turn a hostile premise back on the questioner, and that it only works if the challenge is calm and specific.

The fix. For spokespeople, the lesson is to know the evidence behind every likely accusation, not just the evidence behind your own claims, so that "give me an example" is a question you can ask rather than fear. The caution is that the move works once; used as a habit it reads as bullying, and Musk's frankness elsewhere in the same interview (the court, the lay-offs) did more for him than the point scored.

Interviews gone wrong: the pattern behind the examples of bad interviews

Strip out the names and the same six traps account for every case above, with the Musk interview as the counter-example: a spokesperson who knew the evidence better than the questioner. This is the summary to keep.

Almost every drill in the right-hand column is something that happens in a room before the interview, which is why we run them as part of media training rather than as notes handed over on the day.

How to recover when a live interview starts going badly

When a live interview begins to go wrong, the recovery is a sequence: pause, answer the question actually asked, bridge to your point, correct any wrong fact immediately, and offer to follow up on anything you do not know. A one-second pause before answering is invisible to viewers and gives you time to hear the question rather than the one you feared. Then answer that question, briefly and honestly, before moving to your message. Pretending the question was different is what makes an audience lean in.

Bridging is the technique of answering the question you were asked, briefly and honestly, and then moving to the point you want to make with a connecting phrase such as "and the bigger issue is" or "what that means for customers is". It differs from dodging in that the question is actually answered first; a dodge skips the answer and goes straight to the message, which is why dodging gets the question asked again and bridging does not.

If you realise you have said something wrong, correct it in the same interview: "I need to correct something I said a moment ago." A correction on air is a small story; a correction issued by press release the next day is a bigger one. If you do not know a figure, say so, give what you do know, and commit to a time: "I don't have the per-unit figure in front of me. The total is £2.7bn and I'll have the breakdown with your producer by 2pm." Then do it. Our 11 tips for your next media interview cover the preparation habits that make these recoveries available to you in the moment, including taking time before answering and never guessing a statistic.

Why these failures start before the interview

Every case above has an off-air cause: a message with no number, a spokesperson who was not in the room, a format nobody researched, a door nobody locked. That is why we treat spokesperson preparation as part of the campaign rather than a separate course. The people writing a client's messages are the people who rehearse them, which means the messages get tested against hostile questions before they are signed off, not after. When we prepared Qoria's spokesperson ahead of its February 2025 research launch on AI and child safety, the preparation was about turning a difficult dataset into a clear, quotable argument that would hold up on Times Radio and in a BBC producer briefing, and the same team then placed the story, starting with a Times exclusive.

The process itself is simple. A briefing call establishes what is coming up, who will speak and the questions they dread. Messaging is cut to three points a spokesperson can say in one breath, each backed by a fact. Each delegate then does a filmed mock interview on a realistic scenario in which the questions start gentle and turn hostile, followed by playback and critique as a group. The core sessions are led by our directors Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, and for journalist-led sessions we bring in working journalists such as former BBC and Times reporter Helen Nugent. For Softcat, we built two crisis scenarios from the company's actual risks, a partner putting its status under review and a global outage caused by a third-party vendor, wrote 20 practice questions for each, filmed ten-minute crisis interviews with every delegate, and then had a journalist re-interview each person on the scenario they had not yet faced and escalate it into a live business-news story. That approach, a realistic incident built from your own risks, is also how we run scenario testing within crisis management work, and it sits alongside the broader communications training we run for marketing and leadership teams.

Frequently asked questions about bad media interviews

What is the most common mistake people make in a media interview?

In our experience, not knowing the number behind their own headline claim. Natalie Bennett, Diane Abbott and Donald Trump all lost interviews on arithmetic a journalist had done in advance. Close behind is repeating a single line regardless of the question, which audiences read as evasion. Both are preparation failures: a three-point message with a rehearsed figure and proof behind each point prevents most of them.

What should you do when a journalist asks the same question again and again?

Answer it, if you can, with the direct yes or no first and the context second, because repetition only works on a spokesperson who is visibly avoiding something. If you genuinely cannot answer, say why once, clearly, and bridge to what you can say. Do not vary the wording of the same evasion; Michael Howard's twelve attempts in 1997 show that the audience counts.

How do you answer a question when you do not know the figure or the fact?

Say you do not have it, give the related fact you do have, and commit to supplying the missing one by a specific time. "I don't have the per-year breakdown in front of me; the total is £298m and I'll get the phasing to you this afternoon" is a credible answer. Guessing is not, because the guess becomes the clip and the correction becomes the follow-up story.

Should a CEO do a live broadcast interview during a crisis, or send someone else?

The chief executive should front a crisis where the harm is serious, because sending a deputy signals that the top of the organisation does not take it seriously. But they should only go live if they can lead with empathy for those affected, hold the facts without guessing and keep their composure under repeated questioning. If they cannot meet those three tests that day, a prepared senior spokesperson is better than a bad live performance.

Can media training actually prevent a bad interview, and what happens on a training day?

It prevents the preparation failures, which are the failures behind every case above. A typical day with us starts with a briefing call, cuts the messaging to three points with a fact behind each, then puts every delegate through a filmed mock interview that starts gentle and turns hostile, followed by group playback. Delegates leave with written notes on their habits and a pre-interview guide. It cannot make someone a natural; it can make sure the number is there and the tone is right.

How should you set up for a remote TV or video interview from home or the office?

Lock the door and tell the household or office you are live. Use a wired connection where possible, put the camera at eye level, place the light in front of you and keep the background plain. Silence every device, test audio with the producer, and run a two-minute silence check before the line goes live. Robert Kelly's 2017 BBC interview is the standing reminder that the words can be perfect and the door still loses.

Got an interview, launch or known risk coming up?

The spokespeople in this list were, almost without exception, capable people who were sent into an interview with a gap that an hour of preparation would have closed. If you have a product launch, a results announcement or a risk you can already see, the time to close that gap is now, not when the producer calls. Talk to us about media training built around your actual announcements and risks, or get in touch and tell us what is coming up. The aim is simple: when someone searches for bad interview clips next year, your spokesperson is not in the results.